In view of the delicacy of the situation, it’s unlikely anyone would want to go to the trouble of holding another presidential election. Others, pointing out that O’Neill is a Democrat and that the will of the people would thus have been thwarted, suggest that it would have been time for an uncharacteristic display of statesmanship on the part of the nation’s leaders, who probably have cooked up some scheme to permit another Republican to be chosen. So some believe that when Carter’s term expired at noon on January 20th, the presidency would rightfully have gone to Tip O’Neill (O’Neill’s term, according to the Constitution, began on January 3). Who becomes vice president if the president dies pro#Under ordinary circumstances - your run-of-the-mill emergencies, as it were - the succession passes from president to vice-president to speaker of the house to president pro tempore of the Senate. The 20th Amendment says “Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President shall have qualified” (one of the qualifications for office presumably being that you’re still breathing when you take the oath), but as far as I can tell Congress has never gotten around to so providing. If both lads had joined the choir, though, we’d have had trouble. The 20th Amendment provides that the vice-president assumes the office. If Ronnie had passed into the Great Void after the electoral college vote, but George didn’t, still no problem. What would probably have happened if Reagan had died would be that the Republican National Committee would have gotten together and nominated a new candidate, whom the electors, being mostly loyal party functionaries, would likely then elect without further ado. (Three Georgia electors tried to vote for Greeley - Georgians are used to voting for stiffs - but Congress refused to count their ballots.) Consequently their votes were split among four now-forgotten politicians. The Democratic electors thus had nobody to vote for, and since nobody really cared because Greeley had lost the election anyway, they got to vote for whomever they wanted. In 1872 the Democratic presidential nominee, Horace Greeley, died between the popular vote and the meeting of the electoral college. In fact, something like this situation has already come up. (Note to Teeming Millions: this was written a while ago.) If the president-elect, the veep-elect, or both die before the electoral college meets, there’s no problem, because the college is theoretically an independent body that can vote for anybody it wants to. Since I have a hard time dealing with abstractions, let’s use as an example the demise of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
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